Alex Sloley - The End is Nigh! Signs of Transformation Apocalypse

schedule 1 week ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Advanced

How can an Agile Coach figure out when an Agile “Transformation” is going wrong? Are there signs that they might see, heed, and take action upon? Of course, there are!

Hindsight is 20/20, but in the moment, these warning signs can be hard to see. Let’s explore some of the more common, and frightening, warning signs that your Agile “Transformation” might be exhibiting. We will discuss transformation provider types, frameworks, keywords, and other anti-patterns that might be signs that THE END IS NIGH.

This session will review common themes and help familiarize you with the warning signs. Armed with this new knowledge, you will be able to plan as appropriate, to help navigate your organization through potential impending doom.

Chris - W.W.F.U - What Works For Us

schedule 1 month ago

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30 Mins

Talk

Beginner

The importance of having direction and the right focus is not as clear cut as most companies think. Most of the time we try to fit ourselves into principles that make sense on paper but do not make sense in real life. I learned this lesson from trying to teach my 7-year-old daughter to play basketball (Trying to live my dreams through my child) and she constantly asked me why we did things a certain way when we can do it this way and this got me thinking.

This presentation is about ignoring the buzz words, lean, agile and waterfall, and understanding that these are frameworks that we should not be cramming ourselves into. But using them in a way that suits you as a team/ business. To truly realize that our way of thinking needs to be flexible and adjust outside these methodologies, so we can grow to work to our best potential.

We will talk about things we have done wrong, things we have done right and understood your teams and how they look at things, share in our experiences. Do we follow things to religiously and do we really do it right!

In essence, this presentation is about thinking like a 7-year-old and continues discovery vs What We know. It takes a look at how the team is the core of the platform and not something that fits into the latest phase we are going through.

schedule 1 week ago

45 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

- How to look out for gamification and habitual depedance in the real world and digital products

- How these features will try to use your own brain chemistry to their advantage

- How to use these features in your own products and assit your customers into building good habits

After walking away from this presentation the attendees should feel they have a much better understanding of habitual loops companies will put in their products to try and get you onboard, the ways in which they will try to manipulate you, and how you can use these powers for good.

schedule 1 week ago

90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

The Liberating microstructures (K. McCandless & H. Lipmanowicz) are a repertory of workshop formats that enable collective intelligence and enhance trust among the participants.

Inclusivity, collective intelligence, collaboration, innovation; these words resonate a lot in today's business world where companies struggle to keep up with growing complexity. And that's why every change agent, leader or facilitator needs to know about Liberating structures.

This 90-minute workshop will be an interactive overview of the liberating microstructures, making every participant aware of the diversity of Liberating formats available.After a quick introduction to the subject, the participants will investigate the framework to finish with the key principles behind the liberating structures.

schedule 2 days ago

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60 Mins

Interactive

Advanced

Story (or, more accurately, capability) slicing is such a core and necessary practice for creating agility at team, portfolio and even organisational level. Yet it is not explicitly included in any of the popular methods and frameworks teams use such as XP, Scrum and Kanban.

Slicing heuristics are collaborative, contextual, evolving techniques for creating focus on value-generating activities, leading to delivering value sooner and with more predictability. They incorporate all of the 4 core agile values from the manifesto, and many of the 12 principles, particularly:

continuous improvement (inspect and adapt),

maximising the amount of work not done (simplicity and focus)

face-to-face conversations

continuous delivery of value

Best results are obtained if heuristics are applied for all types of work, by all of the folks collaboratively across the value chain, but they can be used as safe-to-fail experiments by individuals and groups wherever they sit in the product delivery pipeline.

Nish Mahanty - Moving from a monolith to a distributed monolith - a cautionary tale on adopting microservices

schedule 1 day ago

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30 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

This talk is a case study of our architectural evolution over the last 2 years.

Our start-up had licensed a customised warehouse management system in order to demonstrate our innovative new business model. The WMS had a traditional 3-tier architecture based on Java and SQL server, and was lightning fast with most of the business logic encapuslated in stored procedures.

Out our start-up we needed to be able to "test and learn" - ie rapidly develop and deploy new features and test them in the market with our customers. Based on the feedback we would identify tweaks to the business model, and fine-tune the functionality that our customers wanted.

We had a launch date 5 months in future, a need to scale rapidly, growing the team from 2 devs to 20 within 8 weeks. And we needed to be able to work in parallel on multiple features. Whilst ensuring that the application was secure, performant, and reliable.

The answer, according to a bunch of experts, was to adopt microservices.

Three years later, we have a suite of secure, scalable, and resilient applications running in AWS. We deploy to Production multiple times a day, and our MTTR is less than 30 minutes.

And we have Services. Some of them are "micro".

But reflecting on what we learned in that period, there are a lot of things that we wished we had done differently.

In this talk I'll walk you through the evolution of our architecture, explain some of the choices, and highlight what we learned, and discuss what we would do differently if faced with the same decisions today.

This case study talks about the last 9 months of our start-up where we went from “no team, and limited functionality” – to launching a successful and thriving business backed by completely custom trading platform and fulfilment engine.

Ed O'Shaughnessy / Geoff Anderson - Can I give you some feedback? Umm, I’d rather you didn’t!

schedule 1 month ago

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60 Mins

Interactive

Beginner

Does the question "Can I give you some feedback?" strike fear into you? You're not alone! We've probably all been on the receiving end of what someone has called feedback but which we know is anything but. We may well have also been given the proverbial "sh*t sandwich", which most certainly is not palatable! This sessions aims to remedy the situation by examining what feedback is truly meant to be and how to apply it appropriately.

Feedback is all the rave with both management and Agile, yet it is so poorly understood and, unfortunately, so badly practiced. We know for organisations and individuals to grow that feedback is essential, but we rarely stop to reflect on how to do this effectively and in a considerate way.

This session will explore the fundamentals of what is genuine feedback, why it is valuable, and where, when and how to provide it in a way that creates desirable outcomes.

Using a simple model of feedback, we will share personal experiences where feedback has and hasn’t worked, and the learning obtained from these situations. With some light role playing, we’ll also experiment with the delivery of feedback, exploring the patterns and anti-patterns of common scenarios you may encounter in the workplace.

schedule 1 month ago

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45 Mins

Panel

Intermediate

Agile is now all grown up and is pretty much the de facto way of working for most teams, but it's proven to be a challenge for adoption at scale. Over the last ten years or so there has been a lot of trial and error figuring out how to break through the cultural barriers, political resistance and technical hurdles that large organisations present. This panel of luminaries (!) brings a wealth of experience helping many different types of organisations transform themselves to be fit for purpose in the 21st century. Come along to hear their stories, some good, some bad and probably a few ugly ones!

PLEASE NOTE: this session will be recorded live by The Weekly Reboot podcast and and made available for public consumption. Your attendance will be taken as acceptance to being recorded and publicly broadcast.

schedule 1 week ago

Sold Out!

45 Mins

Talk

Beginner

Given that Kanban is more than just "Post-its on wall", getting started is often misunderstood and leads to shallow implementations that don't give you much bang for your buck. In this talk, I will give you a brief introduction of how to get a Kanban implementation underway effectively using a technique that has been tried and tested worldwide. We will look at STATIK - the "Systems Thinking Approach to Introducing Kanban". As we unpack it, you'll see that it can be very helpful in getting your Kanban system started in the right way and will help guide the conversations that you need to have to get started.

David Alia - The Dome: A powerful experiment for change when change is hard

schedule 2 weeks ago

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45 Mins

Case Study

Intermediate

"In ""Under the Dome"", the novel by Stephen King, the inhabitants of Chester's Mill wake up to a strange barrier, which is similar to a dome, covering the whole city, completely isolating it from the surrounding world. The dome is impenetrable, only a small amount of air and water can pass through. Following this puzzling event, the community under the dome has to change, for the best or the worst.

Most successful transformations at scale have a lot in common with this novel, metaphorically speaking of course.Based on this story, we designed a brand new culture hacking experiment that proved to be successful in many environments.

Change automatically generates resistance from the team to change AND from the ecosystem around (the ""antibodies"").What if, in order to change the culture of a whole ecosystem, a team was isolated from the outside world, protected by an unbreakable and transparent dome?

This story can be used as a referential, as this is a metaphor helping communicate and relate to the challenges faced in situations of change. Using it as an alignment between fiction and reality, this story will open the discussion to easily relatable transformation and business agility topics."

schedule 3 days ago

30 Mins

Interactive

Beginner

I feel like there are other continuous improvement addicts, or perennial impostor syndrome sufferers that feel the compulsive need to be more than they are, and do more in order to reach that unattainable perfect state of being...

And I know that a bunch of us find ourselves in a state of constant information processing & overload... thanks to the infinite information we are exposed to every day.

I have also come to believe this can be super unhealthy, and that there is something fundamental that we are losing, thanks to our perpetual busyness.

Some come and have a little chat, and reflect, about the role of not doing... and instead... being... (quietly)

Daniel Prager / Andi Herman - When at first they don't want to change: Shared lessons from Addiction Therapy and Agile Coaching

schedule 3 weeks ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

The easy case for coaching looks something like this: a prospective coachee wants to change, can articulate their goals, and is matched up with a suitably experienced and competent coach, the two are a good fit, and they quickly get down to the challenging yet rewarding business of growth and change.

But what if a person (or team) doesn't want to change and would rather not be coached? And despite this an external power deems that change is needed and that coaching will bring this change about. What's a coach to do? What about the coachee(s)? What about the role of the client who's engaged the coach?

This situation is not uncommon, and bears more that a passing resemblance to what often goes on in addiction treatment. A person with a drug addiction (and often other problems) doesn't necessarily welcome therapeutic intervention at the outset. But an external authority has ordered it.

In this session we will explore the parallels between the two modalities of addiction therapy and coaching, including the applicability of the following psychological approaches to change:

The Transtheoretical Model of Change and the related technique of Motivational Interviewing

Kegan and Lahey's Immunity to Change

These approaches offer pragmatic insights into how to flex and adapt your coaching approach in the face of some of the most common impediments to change.

Aurelien Marando - The building blocks of workshops

schedule 3 weeks ago

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45 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

Facilitation is among the most important skills for Scrum Masters and Meeting Leaders. This highly interactive 45 minutes workshop session intend to provide any individual with an understanding and a toolset to create and structure their own meetings and workshops.

Romain Vailleux - [WORKSHOP] Explore & live an intercultural encounter and learn some sociology on the way

schedule 3 weeks ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

The Derdians are a rural and peaceful people living in small huts nestled in lush green valleys. Previously renouncing any form of modernity, the Derdians decided this year to open up to the world and welcome new products from around the globe.

Get ready for a clash of cultures!

"The Derdians" is a well-knowed workshop used by cultural hackers to make teams (or people) acknowledge their cultural differences, and find their way to a better communication/collaboration.

The participants of this workshop experiment (and therefore, discover) the gregarious reflexes that human groups have when they are in contact with a different culture. The participants leave the session with key levers to reduce the clash of cultures and to encourage collaboration of culturally-distant teams.

Facilitated by Romain Vailleux, this workshop begins with a role-playing game (hilarious and dynamic!), and ends with a debrief phase to compile the learning of the workshop as a take away.

David Martin - Let me tell you a story...

schedule 1 month ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Stories are an amazingly powerful communication tool. They sidestep our rational brain before crash tackling our limbic system and putting our amygdala in a headlock (see what I did there? I just told a story).

Humans have used stories for thousands of years to communicate. From the earliest creation myths to modern podcasting. Stories grab you, drag you in and implant their message deep in your brain.

The only place we don't use stories to communicate is in business where we are told to "stick with the facts", "take emotion out" and "keep it professional".

Let's change that. Let's put the emotion back in and give ourselves a communications edge through the amazing power of stories.

Mark Grebler - High performing software engineering teams: how to grow then and how to slow them

schedule 1 month ago

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30 Mins

Talk

Beginner

This presentation will have a close look at what makes high performing software development teams, as well as what hinders them. It will cover each level of the organisational hierarchy starting at individual software developer, then group of engineers, full cross-functional product-engineering team, wider product-engineering department, and finish at the entire company. At each level, we will see multiple examples of teams to see what factors contribute to high performing software teams, as well as less performant teams.

schedule 1 month ago

90 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

Due to requests and feedback, this is a repeat of last year's session for those who missed it.

How do you develop an agile mindset? You can't teach it, but you can grow it by changing your beliefs.

In this session we will cover a brief introduction to the research by Kegan and Lahey where they discovered that behind each of our habits is a strongly held belief that not only keeps us in our groove, but also fights any change that threatens the status quo.

We will discuss why personal growth and increasing our mental complexity is so important for agile and business transformations in today's VUCA world to succeed.

We will create your Immunity To Change Map which is a simple way to bring to light the your personal barriers to change. We will start by outlining your commitment to an improvement goal. Then we will sketch out the things that you are either doing or not doing that prevent progress towards the achievement goal. The Map then identifies competing commitments, as well as the big underlying assumptions behind those competing commitments.

The objective is to pinpoint and address whatever beliefs and assumptions are blocking you from the changes you want to make.

You will leave this workshop with a better understanding and tools to overcome the forces of inertia and transform your life and your work.

Daniel Ploeg - The Ship Game

schedule 3 weeks ago

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45 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

Using Origami, attendees will see how flow can work in a "pull system" and compare that to the way it responds to a "push system". From this simple simulation, attendees will experience how increased WiP actually slows down our ability to deliver something to a customer.

Come along and experience flow and how you can start to improve your customer outcomes, not by doing more but by doing less!

Kiran Ravula - Be Leader in You Own Context

schedule 1 month ago

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30 Mins

Interactive

Intermediate

We always blame leadership and organization culture for ineffective Agile transformation. So do you think Agile transformation is top down or bottom up?

Agile transformation is not top down or bottom up. Its start with you. Changing the organization starts with changing yourself. We all have things in our life be it work or personal life , we want to change – our eating habits, our hair colour, our productivity. But change is hard! That’s because these things you want to change serve an important purpose – consciously, you may despise the behaviour, but on a deeper level the behaviour you want to change is a protection or a pattern that helped or helps you meet your needs. Until you identify and understand the purpose of this behaviour, change will be extremely difficult.

Here are strategies that can help you change “I” – Insights, “A” – Awareness and “M” Maturity.This presentation is focuses on scientifically proven patterns as well as real-time examples people can relate to and generate insights, create awareness and test their maturity to take up the challenge.

Call for Proposals 7 days left

Submit before Jun 2 '19 11:59 PM AEST

LAST is Australia's cross-functional conference. Rather than retreat to our trade and talk among our peers-in practice we want LAST to be a place where people can learn about the holistic process of product and service development, or growing organisations and our own skills and careers.

This conference is also about learning and sharing from our colleagues. Over the years we have come to value the following things;

Interactive sessions over presentations

Specific tools and techniques over general frameworks

Learning from mistakes and failures over sharing sanitised success stories

Diversity of content over following industry best practices

Evidence based approaches over novel ideas

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Call for Proposals Description

LAST is Australia's cross-functional conference. Rather than retreat to our trade and talk among our peers-in practice we want LAST to be a place where people can learn about the holistic process of product and service development, or growing organisations and our own skills and careers.

This conference is also about learning and sharing from our colleagues. Over the years we have come to value the following things;

Interactive sessions over presentations

Specific tools and techniques over general frameworks

Learning from mistakes and failures over sharing sanitised success stories

Diversity of content over following industry best practices

Evidence based approaches over novel ideas

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.